5/52 - Nothing Like a Good GroundHog Day Cry
This week, I was going to write something about my mom -- she died a year ago on GroundHog Day -- but when I reread what I wrote last year, I decided that with a few additions [bracketed], I couldn't do much better. But maybe a little. So here goes.
As Yogi would say, it's like deja vu all over again; I may return to it every year. You might expect this when writing about someone who a) loved to have the last word; and b) passed away on GroundHog Day.
Sallyann Mancini – 7/26/1931 to 2/2/2023
There are times when all the family history conversations about birth dates, dates of death, and stories of our origins become so painful and joyful and so close to the surface. Yesterday was one of those days.
There is a tradition in our church on Pentecost where we get a word on a card, a word to provide inspiration for the coming year. Mine for this year was "testimony." [Note: for 2024, I totally lucked out - my word is "fun."]
I thought of that yesterday as my sister, my wife, and I sat by my mother's bedside and watched her take her last breath. What is the single word to best summarize a life? What is the best single word to describe my mom, what she meant, and what she left behind?
The one that came to mind was “character.”
One of the benefits of choosing “character” as her word is that there are so many implications of the word, and Sal was a complicated person.
Of course, one interpretation of "character" is "a person marked by notable or conspicuous traits," as in "she was quite a character." And Sal – we all called her Sal – was quite a character.
As kids, she taught us succinct lessons in theology AND meteorology, as in "Jesus, Mary, and Holy Saint Joseph. Clean up this place; it looks like a cyclone hit it."
She taught us lessons in frugality, handing us each gigantic brown paper bag to take to school every morning, containing a single sandwich because "why on earth would I buy small lunch bags when the grocery store gives these to us for free?"
She taught us lessons in the nuances of language, conveying that the word “Perhapsssss…" when said correctly and with an eye-roll, actually means, "I can't believe you just said that." She also taught us that the phrase, "The problem with that is…." is a helpful way to stop any debate.
The examples go on and on and are hilarious. As we all said today multiple times, “What a legacy. We’ll be telling Sal stories for a long time.”
But there is another definition of "character," focused on someone of high standards, as in a person "of character." Especially with my mom's passing, I am struck by how unbelievably blessed the six of us were in our choice of parents (haha, I know that’s not the way it works.)
We had an exceedingly normal childhood. Little did we know how the odds were stacked against that outcome, given our parents' childhoods.
My father's father was an Italian immigrant, institutionalized in 1932 for the rest of his life. My father's mother was also an Italian immigrant, institutionalized in 1938 for the rest of her life. My father spent his life escaping the traumas of his childhood and never talked about it.
My mother's largely absent father was a stowaway on a boat from Sweden when he was barely a teenager, who never seemed to lose the wanderlust that initially drove him to board that boat, and who committed suicide when my mother was 13. My mother's mother was an immigrant from Ireland, a woman of incredible strength who raised two children – mainly as a single parent – in the middle of the Depression. The challenges she experienced were so profound that in an Angela's Ashes time in the mid 1930s she applied for passports for herself and her two children to return to Ireland. I think the tough shell that my mom sometimes had was her way of protecting herself from what life could sometimes hand you.
[My mom got into family history research at about the same age as I am now, although at a pre-Ancestry time when this kind of research was much more tedious. At some point, she requested her father's military records. In true Sal fashion, before she handed this stack off to my brother, she struck out the cause of death on her father's death certificate (self-inflicted gunshot wound) with a black magic marker, demonstrating a lack of understanding of how to truly redact information in a document (in her method, you could hold it up to the light and see through the magic marker).
These papers contain a seemingly limitless set of requests by my grandfather to various government authorities for compensation based on his service during World War 1. His military service consisted entirely of service in a New York shipyard for a little more than a year. After that, he checked into numerous hospitals and VA facilities during the 30s and 40s, usually staying the maximum permissible amount before release. His ailments included the following at various times; he claimed on the incoming paperwork that he could not work during the 30s and 40s for years at a time:
Coronary arteriosclerosis
Myocardial damage
Duodenal ulcer
Emphysema
Flat feet
Bronchial asthma
A gunshot wound on the left side of the chest
The “gunshot wound on the left side of the chest” gives me pause, but even given that, my grandfather was either one of the unhealthiest people I've ever run into, perhaps a bit of a hypochondriac, and/or an opportunist. I’m still trying to figure it out. I do know that before WW1 he apparently hung out with Tex Rickard (famous prospector, gambler, well-known boxing promoter, founder of the New York Rangers) and between WW1 and his marriage to my grandmother in 1929, he was one of the most successful sea captains in the Southeastern United States. I also discovered that between the finalization of his divorce from his first wife in 1928 and marrying my grandmother in 1929, he was engaged to someone named "Mrs. M.J. Gayser” and went so far as to change the beneficiary on his $18 military pension to her.
I found in the papers a handwritten synopsis by my mom of all of the various addresses her absent father had from 1917 until he died in 1945. She discovered 34 different addresses. The soundtrack that runs through my mind when I think about him is from The Temptations:
Papa was a rolling stone
Wherever he laid his hat was his home
And when he died, all he left us was alone]
And yet… And yet… And yet, these two unlikely people combined to create a family of six kids who grew up surrounded by love, hope, and laughter. Yes, we are collectively a weird bunch. But we laugh a lot. And my parents leave a legacy of 16 grandkids and 14 great-grands. How does such a blessing happen?
Character.
As my sister noted, “My mom was one of those people I thought would live forever. She survived much yet kept going. The deaths of two husbands. Spinal surgery. Cancer. Knee surgery. Heart surgery. Yet she didn’t give up. We were blessed to have her for 91+ years.”
Oh yes, even the death of my dad when she was 56 – 56! – couldn't stop her. She found love not once but TWICE, both times with men of strong "character." As my mom declined in the past three years and occasionally showed her spiky side more often, one of the sweetest consolations was her conversations about how blessed she had been to find two such rare men. As we all were.
Sal was there when the six of us took our first breaths. And we were blessed to be with her when she took her last breath. Truly a holy moment.
Sally Mancini. 1931-2023. Quite a character.
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Note: My sister June and I did the eulogy at my mom’s funeral. We decided to do so only using her own words, which we drew from this compilation, Sal on Sal -- https://www.amazon.com/Sal-26-1931-2023-ebook/dp/B0C4LXFB1C. Which I would give away, but Amazon won’t let me. Hence the $1 price tag.
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This is part of a series of posts designed to keep me busy and off the street. Hopefully some of these musings will contribute to a successor to Immigrant Secrets (https://www.amazon.com/Immigrant-Secrets-Search-My-Grandparents/dp/B0B45GTTPP).
You can get the posts directly HERE (https://www.searchformygrandparents.com/subscribe) or use the subscribe button on this page (https://authory.com/johnmancini).
